Mean Girls: A Reflection of Middle School Relational Aggression

The seventh and eighth grades are a time of growth, mentally and physically. During this time students are trying to find their place in the middle school caste system. Through this journey of self discovery, students may act out with a type of aggression called relational aggression, more commonly known as emotional aggression. Through the use of taunting, passing notes, exploitation, Internet bullying etc, more powerful students bully the less powerful. This thesis uses the theoretical model of symbolic interaction to determine what social characteristics that aggressor identifiers and victim identifiers see themselves as possessing, in schools attended by students of Western Kentucky University, as well as seeking to find what identity characteristics of students are aggressor identifiers and which students are victim identifiers